Literature Review

My recent plane trips have give me the opportunity to read some of what has been recommended to me by and .

Top 10 tells the story of a rookie cop in a futuristic manhattan. Everyone has some special power, or multiple super powers. Including street bums, hookers, and the intelligent, speaking canine with a cybernetic humanoid exo-skeleton who is a step up on the ladder from alot of the other cops. It’s visually impressive, detailed, varied, colorful, etc, etc. The plot isn’t emphasized, but it’s there. It’s alot like NYPD blue with super heroes, and a correspondingly rich setting. But, the relationships are much the same. I liked it, and would buy more.

Y is an interesting contrast. The story here is a world not terribly unlike our own, but with the abrupt death of every mammal with a Y chromosome. Everyone, that is, but the protagonist and his recently purchased pet monkey. It’s a dark world, which rapidly degenerates technologically (a rapidity that I’m skeptical of, but then again, I could see losing half the work force being a very big deal). And some other, to my mind, extremely unrealistic social changes. It’s visually simpler. I think it’s trying hard to be social commentary, though I think it’s mostly clumsy, stupid and wrong on that front. For some reason, that doesn’t bother me much, I do enjoy its storyline so far. Maybe the protagonist will become less of a dick at some point.

The Wasp Factory is a well written journey into the mind and past of a severely damaged individual. The protagonist has killed multiple children and countless animals, living in a sort of social isolation on an island. Though the murder of humans was “just a phase” and a thing of the past, by the time the novel starts, I still had the impression of a violent, mysogynistic, superstitious misanthrope. And that impression, building a sense of the character’s identity and thought processes, consumes most of the short book. The twist at the end wasn’t wholly unexpected, though I hadn’t thought out all the ramifications of the idea, and seen all the supporting hints leading into it. Reading the book was alot like watching a trainwreck. The character’s mind was the clear, realistic seeming disaster. The writing style was great. I usually wouldn’t read a novel like this all the way through, but in this case I did. The very last pages of the book offer some hope of healing for the character, and made me feel better about having read it, but still, not a book I’d want to read a second time.

China Mountain Zhang has several stories, loosely connected to one another. There is the central series, and a clear main character, and interspersed stories of minor characters, all told from the perspective of the central character for that story. The writing style reflects in a certain sense, the lives of the characters. They’re largely socially disconnected, but they occasionally make contact here and there. Usually they find a bit of themselves along the way. If the central themes of The Wasp Factory are destruction and a quiet rage, then the central themes of China Mountain Zhang are loneliness (usually in a crowd) and despair. I liked CMZ much more than WF. The progressive nature of the growth and resolution of that underlying tension/theme/problem/whatever made for a much more rewarding story.

Overall, mad props to both of them for expanding my reading.